Title

Author

Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2013

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Advisor

Sean Gavin

Abstract

Relativistic heavy ion collision experiments show clear evidence of creation of a very short-lived phase of nuclear matter consisting of color-deconfined quarks and gluons. This matter is known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Fluctuation and correlation measurements of the detected particles have played a very important role in revealing the properties of QGP. In particular, these measurements have shown that the QGP behaves like a nearly perfect liquid. Relativistic hydrodynamics has been successfully used to study how the QGP evolves before the system hadronizes and ultimately produces the final state particles. Transport properties like shear viscosity constitute an important part in such studies.

This work is focused on developing a second order hydrodynamic theory for the evolution of two-particle transverse momentum correlations. We use general temper- ature dependent transport and relaxation coefficients as well as the latest information on equations of state and use both first and second order relativistic viscous hydro- dynamics to compute experimentally measurable observables. We will show that our computations using the second order viscous hydrodynamics are in good agreement with experimental data. We also highlight some features that distinguish the second order viscous hydrodynamic evolution of QGP from the first order.